When “Duke” Wellington Reiter rode into town last August, to take the reins at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, some of the locals got a little nervous. A Harvard-trained architect, and also an artist, Reiter had spent five years as dean of Arizona State University’s college of design, in Phoenix, where he’d made a name for himself by lassoing a big pile of money and clearing away a speck of history to build an urban campus (or what passes for urban in those parts). Surveying the SAIC spread, with its herd of 2,900 students roaming through six scattered buildings and 1,200 classes, with no majors or letter grades to brand them, he might’ve been thinking something along the lines of “Whoa.” The scent of change was in the air.
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Reiter warned of a future in which there’ll be “more scrutiny of the cost/benefit ratio of an education in the arts,” and more competition—especially from “for-profit options that can focus with laser-like precision on a segment of the market and serve them extremely well.” In this “financial exigency,” he wrote, we need to “focus on our strengths” and “streamline our administrative procedures.” With deficits projected for the next two years, he added, budget cuts of about 5 percent will be required.
Last week, both the school’s communications and publications directors got streamlined out of their jobs. Reiter brought the beginnings of his own posse with him, installing Sherrie Medina, former coordinator of strategic initiatives for ASU’s college of design, in the newly created position of associate vice president of communications and strategic planning. He’s also initiated a search for a provost, adding a layer of administration the SAIC’s done without up to now. Until the job’s filled, Reiter’s having a consultant “focus on the efficiency of our operations and what we can do to align our needs with economic realities”—which will give him more time to focus on his main tasks of being the school’s public face and raising money. A search will also be conducted next year for a new dean of faculty to replace Carol Becker, who left in 2007 to become dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
But acting dean of faculty Lisa Wainwright says, “I’m in favor of making small cuts rather than lopping off programs.” The SAIC’s breadth of offerings and open curriculum “defines who we are as an art school,” she says, and “differentiates us. We’re not a vocational school. We do independent experimental media. It’s a humanist education.”
